Terus terang, banyak dari orang Indonesia masih
menyepelekan perpustakaan dan buku. Pergilah kerumah
orang, akan kita temui pajangan mahal yang tertata
apik tetapi tidak ada buku. Jangan heran, tuan rumah
adalah jebolan universitas. Keadaan yang sama
menyedihkan juga kita jumpai di banyak universitas.
Kalaupun ada buku mengenai topik yang kita inginkan,
bukunya keluaran tahun 1950an.
Beruntung kita punya Google. Dengan memilih kata
kunci yang tepat, kita akan menemukan bahan informasi
yang kita cari -- bahkan yang sebelumnya tidak kita
perkirakan. Sekarang Google lebih maju lagi, bersama
dengan Stanford dan MIT sedang mendigitalkan
perpustakaan mereka. Sebentar lagi Anda dapat
menyusun paper, thesis atau disertasi cukup dari rumah
saja, gratis pula.
Salam,
RM
http://www.news.com/
The college library of tomorrow
By Stefanie Olsen
http://news.com.com/The+college+library+of+tomorrow/2100-1025_3-5817291.html
Story last modified Wed Aug 03 12:30:00 PDT 2005
Last December, Google started on a wildly ambitious
and somewhat controversial plan to digitize the
collections of some of the world's largest university
and public libraries in an effort to make hard-to-find
books accessible by the click of a mouse.
But out of the spotlight, a number of universities are
already working on bookless, digital libraries that
reflect a growing understanding of how today's
tech-savvy students access information.
"The notion of a library as a physical collection has
long ago been altered," said Michael Keller,
university librarian and director of academic
information resources at Stanford University in Palo
Alto, Calif. "It's now physical and virtual."
A number of universities are creating bookless,
digital libraries that reflect a growing understanding
of how today's tech-savvy students access information.
Bottom line:
As college collections morph into libraries of the
future, the challenge will be maintaining the
integrity of vast old libraries while embracing a new
medium.
Stanford librarians aren't the only academics working
on the libraries of tomorrow. The Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, the University of California
school system, the University of Michigan and
University of Virginia, among others, have also been
digitizing their collections, developing new
technologies and creating a lasting archive of
electronic material.
"We're really in a period of challenging transition,
where we sort of know how to provide digital access to
information, but we're very concerned about how to
build a scholarly record over the long term," said
MacKenzie Smith, associate director for technology in
MIT's libraries.
Within five years at Stanford--where Google's founders
hatched the idea for their company in a graduate
student dormitory--officials hope to build a bookless
engineering library, Keller said.
Most of the plans for the engineering library are
still being hashed out. But an engineering library,
unlike a traditional library, particularly lends
itself to going bookless because students are more
concerned about finding information than about the
presentation of that information. Shakespeare?
Hemingway? Those books need to stay on a shelf. A
treatise on Unix kernel development? Not so much.
Instead of physical books, the engineering library
will house group study rooms, a communal workspace and
computer terminals with access to millions of industry
journals, scholarly papers, academic research and
books in digital form, as well as the Web. Specialized
librarians will teach students heuristics, or
scientific methods to seek information.
Stanford is one of the universities working with
Google, and it will eventually digitize the
university's entire 8.7 million-volume collection.
It's also working with the search technology company
Grokis (or Grokker), which makes software that
graphically depicts data and its relevant
relationships. The university is testing Groxis
software plug-ins for access to 350 different data
sources, and it hopes to one day have hundreds of
plug-ins available for students.
Stanford is also developing search technologies that
evaluate results on a statistical or taxonomic basis,
as opposed to a keyword basis. A project called
TopicMap at Highwire Press, Stanford's search site for
scholarly papers, lets people search for concepts in
thousands of journals and displays those relationships
in a graphical interface.
Making room for computers
The university even has storage space in the nearby
city of Livermore so it can sock away books it no
longer needs on the shelves.
On the East Coast, MIT has for nearly five years run
"D Space," a repository to capture all types of
digital material, including books, articles, theses,
technical reports, images and simulations. The
Cambridge, Mass., university is also working with
publishers of print and online materials to obtain
long-term access to digital copies that may be under
subscription and that will eventually be pulled from
the Web. MIT even has a supercomputer center in San
Diego to store all that data.
MIT also has also begun using open-source software
called "Lockss," created at Stanford, to harvest
electronic journals from the Web so it can archive
them for later use, even if the material is licensed.
That way, if a journal ceases to exist, at least MIT
has a copy of the information.
Other universities are also taking books off their
shelves. The University of Texas at Austin, for
example, moved nearly 90,000 volumes from a main
library to other buildings to make room for computers.
By the fall, the Longhorn campus will have a so-called
"digital information commons" in the main library to
help students find the books elsewhere.
Yet the biggest challenge to digitizing libraries are
the concerns of publishers and intellectual property
rights holders. Copyright laws have changed over time
and can be different outside the United States. As a
result, many book-digitization projects must entail
copious amounts of time researching the rights of
works and obtaining permissions.
In truth, a digital library transformation has been on
the way since the late 1960s. Henriette Avram, a
librarian working at the Library of Congress,
pioneered a national catalog of books called the MARC
(for machine-readable cataloging) record that was
shared over a computer network.
"Libraries were ahead of everyone, including the CIA,"
said Stanford's Keller.
Some university plans were kicked into high-gear last
year when the one of the largest publication
libraries, the U.S. government, plans to make 95
percent of its material available exclusively in
digital form on the Web this year.
Then Google upped the ante. Its initial digitization
partners included Stanford, Harvard University, Oxford
University and the New York Public Library. Yet Google
has also stirred controversy among librarians that
claim its book project violates the copyrights of
authors and publishers.
The challenge, of course, will be maintaining the
integrity of those vast old libraries while embracing
a new medium.
"The library that acts as a steward will have to learn
what it means to capture and persistently manage new
vehicles of information," said Daniel Greenstein,
associate vice provost of libraries at the University
of California's Digital Library project. "It will have
to change in order to stay the same."
Copyright ©1995-2005 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights
reserved.
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